Hurdy Gurdy Man
by pdhudson
Summary: In August of 1968, as protesters roil outside the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Charles Xavier quietly sends three Mutants to infiltrate the protests. Their mission: to calm the crowd, thereby preventing a riot. But Sage, Mimic, and Peace will soon find that it's nowhere near that simple. Same AU as Class of '64, contains some light spoilers if you haven't read that.


**FROM THE DESK OF TESSA FIORINA**

August 31, 1968. 2 a.m.

I must be crazy to leave a written record. Officially, the Chicago mission never happened. A team of telepaths can afford that luxury. Police forget. Arrest records go missing. A young man flies to the Mutant Congo in the dead of night, eyes still stinging from tear gas. Only three people remember, and Charles asks that none of us write an after-action report.

That's one of the things that haunts me about being a telepath: I know firsthand how easy it is to completely rewrite someone's reality. I can't help but wonder if my own has been tampered with. Maybe that's why I'm willing to be irrational, just this once, and write it all down: to prove to myself that the Chicago mission happened. I was there, in Grant Park — me and Cal and Ollie. We were all there. Maybe we shouldn't have been.

* * *

Charles called me into his office on Monday, June 10th.

"Tessa," he said, "I know you haven't been with us very long, but I was hoping you might lead a mission."

My brain short-circuited. "A mission? Me? _Lead? _The X-Men?"

"Not the X-Men. This mission is a bit… clandestine for the X-Men. I can't have any recognizable faces on this. I need a small group to infiltrate an anti-war rally and calm down the participants. Keep it from breaking out into a riot. No uniforms, no official FBI involvement. Ideally, it will be as if you were never there at all."

I nodded, digesting his words. "So you want telepaths, but nobody as well-known as Jean Grey or yourself. Could Mimic work?"

Mimic — real name Calvin Rankin — was a new recruit. As his codename implied, he had the ability to copy, or "mimic," the powers of whichever Mutants were around him. In my general vicinity, he'd be a telepath.

"I was thinking of Mr. Rankin, yes. But the main person I want for this team is Oliver."

I instantly rankled. I'd generally avoided Oliver Sanders since he came here. It was nothing personal. He couldn't control his power — and, given his reduced mental faculties, he would likely never have the capacity to — and so he made everyone in his presence giddy with happiness. That sort of power made me uneasy. I wanted to retain control over my emotions. I wanted to know that my thoughts and feelings were my own, that I viewed the world objectively — or as objectively as a person can, in any case. I didn't even drink beer.

We'd found him last summer in northern California. He'd been wandering around with some hippies who'd likely kept him around for the euphoric effect he had on them and then abandoned him in a pine forest, helplessly muttering to himself and his imaginary friend "Tinkerbull." He wasn't young enough to be a student — Charles guessed early-to-mid-thirties, based on appearance and his cloudy (but firsthand) memories of growing a victory garden with his mother and collecting scrap metal with Boy Scouts — but he clearly couldn't take care of himself. He remembered little about his past and had trouble retaining memories going forward. His mutation affected him first and worst, wrapping him in a cloud of contentment that muddled his mind. He'd burnt out on his own drug.

So Charles took him in and set him to work as a gardener. The school already had hired hands for that, but Oliver had a green thumb and liked to feel useful. Some of the students liked to spend time with him. They called him "Peace." It was difficult to tell if they genuinely liked him (he was fairly non-threatening, if you didn't mind his constant muttering to himself) or if they merely used him as a legal high. I could have dug into their minds to see, but as I said, I preferred to avoid the whole situation.

"And what are we doing playing peacekeepers for a bunch of smelly hippies?" I asked. "What does this have to do with Mutants?"

He cleared his throat. "It's not just any anti-war rally. They'll be protesting the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. I'm told it has great potential for violence, particularly if someone lowers the American flag at Grant Park. And with the world's eyes on Chicago, that violence and chaos would have ripple effects across all national politics — and that most certainly effects Mutants. The Democrats' refusal to make Mutant rights a priority is still far better than the Republicans' active antipathy."

I could tell from his mix of caginess and bizarrely specific details that this was one of those missions given him by his mysterious contact who seemed to know the future. The last time he roped me in on one of those was approximately a year prior. He enlisted my help in locating an escaped fugitive — not even a Mutant, but an ordinary human by the name of James Earl Ray. I tracked him down twice: once to provide his location and the false name under which he was living, and again to confirm that he was back in prison.

Eventually, consumed with curiosity, I'd looked him up. He seemed a petty criminal — burglary, robbery, a bit of mail fraud — not nearly terrible enough to warrant a nationwide manhunt. Unless one knew he would eventually do much worse.

Whether Charles was secretly working with Irene Adler or had another precog in his Rolodex was unclear. Whenever I got close to asking, he made it clear that this contact wished to remain anonymous. Well, who was I to argue with a psychic?

"So," I asked Charles, "what terrible future are we preventing with this one?"

He barely managed to hide his smirk. "Supposedly, the election of Richard Nixon. But preventing a riot from breaking out ought to supply you with enough motivation."

"And Oliver… could he even handle a mission? Has he ever been out on one?"

"Only one," Charles said. "You know Rusty, I'm sure. When the X-Men went to recruit him, they took Oliver along because of the volatility of his gift. They hoped Oliver's influence would calm him enough to curb his destruction."

"Oliver was there for _that _?"

Charles nodded. "Yes. He was able to stop Rusty from panicking and starting any fires, but it took a toll on him. He doesn't respond well to being around angry people or violence, but if necessary, you can convince him to stay there with candy." He folded his hands in his lap. "I'm told he particularly enjoys lemonheads."

I shook my head. "You want me to babysit Oliver at a hippie protest that you _know _has the potential to erupt in violence?"

"If Oliver's there, it might not. But if things do go awry, get him and Calvin out of there."

I looked past Charles, out his office window. In the garden, Oliver was sitting with Calvin in the sunshine. Oliver was a roly-poly man with a stringy mop-top, black horn-rimmed glasses, and a red tie which he habitually wore over clothing that did not require ties. A cigarette hung out of his mouth seemingly at all times, except when he was eating candy. I suppose an analyst would call it an oral fixation. Calvin, a tall blond jock who looked ridiculous by Oliver's side, was already absorbing and practicing the use of Oliver's powers, by the look of his glazed-over eyes and goofy grin.

"So I'm there to babysit them both."

"And do what you can to calm the crowd yourself, amplifying the effect of their powers with your own telepathy."

I looked back to Charles. "And what if the combined powers of the two overwhelm me, and I'm too happy to do my job?"

"That's why I wanted you for this mission, Tessa. You value objectivity and self-control. I trust you to keep your head screwed on tight."

I nodded. "Thank you, sir." But I wasn't sure I deserved that trust. Emotions are complicated. Perhaps no one deserves that kind of trust.

* * *

I kept my ear to the ground in Greenwich Village, collecting flyers and leftist newspapers. By late August, most movement leaders were urging people not to go to Chicago. Mayor Daley had refused to give any anti-war protesters permits to march and was mobilizing the police and the military to crack some skulls if they tried. Whoever did show up to protest in spite of those warnings was likely itching for a fight. It didn't take a precog to predict that things would get bloody.

Regardless of the risk (or perhaps because of it), the Yippies were planning a weeklong "Festival of Life" in Lincoln Park, and the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam had a number of demonstrations planned, including a few at Grant Park. They were sending buses out from Union Square on the 26th and back on the 29th. We'd miss the Festival of Life, but I figured the Yippies were clowns; most likely, all the action would be at the Mobe rallies.

That's what I thought, anyway. So I bought three round-trip tickets on those Mobe buses, thinking it would help us blend in and we could calm down the protesters coming in from New York. But by the time the day came to board those buses, I'd already begun to worry we were too late. Before the festival had even started, police had shot a young hippie dead. They said he was carrying a gun. At the time, I believed them. On every night of the festival, when the police tried to clear the park at curfew, there'd been terrible fighting — police attacking protesters with billy clubs and tear gas and protesters throwing rocks at police. I started to think we should have come for the entire week.

But then again, it seemed unlikely that Oliver could have endured an entire week. He may have felt euphorically happy most of the time, but (or perhaps therefore) he couldn't handle bad feelings. As Charles had suggested, I bribed him with candy. He arrived in Chicago draped in candy necklaces, candy bracelets, a candy watch — that way, he could gnaw on them continuously without having to ask me for more. And I had more in my bag: lemonheads and Bazooka Joe and those banana split chews. As if I needed to feel more like a babysitter.

Calvin, of course, was no help at all. Having minimal training, he struggled to maintain control over my telepathy and Oliver's pheromones. Sometimes he was euphoric, and sometimes he seemed almost in a trance.

On the bus, he tapped me on the arm. "Tess. Hey, Tess."

I looked up from my book to see him grinning vacantly, his head lolling on his shoulder. "Don't call me Tess," I said. "My name is Tessa." _And use telepathy if you're going to communicate anything sensitive. _

_Tessa. How cool is it that we're X-Men now? _he asked.

_We're not X-Men, _I said, looking back down at my book.

_What are we, then? _

_I don't know. _

Calvin leaned his head back and looked at the bus ceiling. _We should give ourselves a name. _

_I don't see how that's necessary for just one mission. _

He gasped and looked back at me with his mouth hanging open. _We're not the X-Men… we're the Hurdy Gurdy Men! Singing songs of love! _

I wrinkled my nose. _What in God's name are you talking about? _

_You know, like the Donovan song? _he said. _His new single. _

_I'm not familiar with it. _

Without a moment's hesitation or any regard for how it might look, he began belting the song aloud. Almost immediately, Oliver jumped up in his seat behind us and excitedly joined in.

It sounded like typical hippie pabulum to me. I slunk down in my seat, trying to disappear, hoping that, to the people in the seats around us, my companions merely looked like they were high. Which, in a sense, they were. But to my surprise, our "fellow" protesters smiled and joined in. Maybe they were all high. Or maybe Ollie was already working his magic. In spite of myself, I began to feel hopeful.

When our bus finally pulled into the city, it felt like driving into a war zone. Seemingly everyone was on strike, and Mayor Daley had mobilized overwhelming force — police, army, and National Guard — to maintain order. The International Amphitheater, where the convention was taking place, was lined with barbed-wire fencing. I could feel the tension thicken all around me, and even Oliver and Calvin together could do little to counteract it.

We followed the herd of protesters from our buses to the Chicago Coliseum for an "Unbirthday Party" for LBJ. (It happened to be the president's birthday.) There were thousands. Some, to my great annoyance, waved Viet Cong flags and called for revolution. I wanted to scream at them: "You want communism? Look at that barbed wire! Look at that line of soldiers waiting to crush you! That's what communism looks like! And the USSR isn't even _this _nice to protesters!" But I held my tongue.

In that instant, Oliver's pheromones — or whatever fueled his power — was my saving grace. I let his good feeling roll over me, reminding me that I myself had doubts about the war. Domino theory seemed overly simplistic, and the war was not going well, and who were we to interfere in another country anyway? I had that in common with the protesters, and that was all we were here for: to pressure the Democrats to end a foolish, doomed war. I could overlook our other disagreements for now.

I practiced those lines, readying myself to recite them if drawn into conversation with real protesters. I telepathically reminded Calvin of his cover story — he looked suspiciously clean-cut, so we decided ahead of time that he was one of those young McCarthy boosters who had gone "Clean for Gene," cutting their hair and putting on suits and ties to knock on doors for the senator. Oliver, of course, looked like he'd fit right in with the Yippies. I had feared I looked a little too respectable, with my bun and glasses, but our strange mix blended in better than I'd expected. Not everyone here was a dirty hippie.

The throng of people marched from the Coliseum to Grant Park for another rally at the bandshell, and we let it sweep us up, weaving through the crowd, spreading Oliver's magic. Given the initial mood, we inevitably failed to create euphoria, but instead a sort of guarded optimism bubbled up in our wake:

"Look how many people are here! They can't ignore this."

"They wouldn't beat up this many kids – not in front of the cameras."

"I think McCarthy has a real chance."

When we got to the bandshell at Grant Park, I quickly located the flagpole and dragged Calvin and Oliver there. And there we stayed for hours, we three defending the flag like kids at summer camp. And it did feel like summer camp, with young people milling on the grass in the late August sunshine. Not many had come here — certainly not the "tens of thousands" advertised in the flyer. It seemed most people had listened to all those movement leaders who said not to come. I telepathically scanned the crowd — not a deep dive, just skimming the surface of everyone's thoughts to pick up on the general mood. I sensed some anger, especially during speeches by particularly worked-up activist leaders, but the resentment mostly kept to a low boil. This crowd didn't seem liable to break out in a riot anytime soon.

And just in case I misread the situation, Calvin and Oliver periodically wandered the rally, saying hi and hugging and singing songs of love. I tried to reinforce their work with my own telepathy. They left smiles behind them wherever they went, and when they came back, I felt such a surge of joy that even I was beaming. Soon the rally was over and Cal and Ollie were leading protesters in song, all of us swaying, arms around each other, singing "We Shall Overcome," and actually believing it.

I remembered what we were here to do — I hadn't gotten that lost in Oliver's power yet — but our mission had faded to a quiet reminder in the back of my mind. If somebody tried to take down the flag, we would stop him. But now, even despite the line of police lurking threateningly at the edges of the rally, it seemed unlikely that such a minor gesture of protest could ever instigate such a terrible thing as a riot. We were all friends here. We were all here for peace.

That evening, organizers announced that the city — astonishingly enough — had given them a permit to come back and protest here the next day: the first and only permit they'd granted any anti-war group. They also said that tomorrow they'd march to the Amphitheater "by any means necessary," which seemed kind of ominous, but I felt confident that the Hurdy Gurdy Men could talk them out of anything unwise.

By some miracle, the cops let us (when had I started thinking of the rally as "us"?) stay in the park all night. Perhaps they'd learned their lesson from the curfew fights over at Lincoln Park. Perhaps the worst had already passed. Perhaps we'd already dissuaded the flag-lowerer from his fateful act.

But tomorrow was nomination day, and we all knew they'd nominate Vice President Humphrey. The peace vote was split between Kennedy and McCarthy, and the party bosses wanted Humphrey. Violence could easily break out upon announcement of Humphrey's nomination. In any case, we had tickets on the Mobe buses returning to New York Thursday morning. And why would we want to leave, anyway? The park was beautiful, the night warm.

We lay out a blanket so we could sleep under the stars. We made conversation with another group — some locals by the name of Joan, Greg, and Nancy. They were nice, and smart, and not at all what I expected. I felt guilty for judging all the protesters as smelly hippies. Some of them were obnoxious know-nothing kids, sure. But some of them, I could get along with.

Our new friends decided to leave the park for dinner, and offered to bring the New Yorkers back some Chicago-style deep-dish pizza. And so we all sat on our blankets and dug into our pizza with plastic forks and listened to Nancy's portable radio. There was fighting on the convention floor. They'd scheduled the debate over Vietnam for the middle of the night, when no one in America would be watching TV, but the anti-war people fought to push it to the middle of the next day. We felt sad, but what could you do? With Oliver there, it all seemed distant and vague. When I finally fell asleep, someone was playing a guitar. The grass prickled through my blanket, the breeze kissing my face with hints of marijuana smoke, and I felt content.

* * *

The next day is still a blur to me. I remember how the park began to fill up. Young people from all around Chicago who had been watching the drama unfold on TV now swarmed in to join the action. I remember how these — the Mobe's promised thousands, at last — looked about evenly matched by the armed men lining the perimeter. I remember the powder blue helmets of Chicago police and the olive green of the National Guard.

Sometime in the afternoon, the debate in the convention hall over the Vietnam War ended: they voted down the proposed "peace plank" by the thinnest of margins. The Democratic Party would not support an end to the war.

And that was when our man came.

We saw him approaching the flagpole, a slim curly-haired young man, and even without telepathy, Cal and I instantly knew what he aimed to do.

Cal nearly threw Ollie in his path. "Hey man, why don't you head back that way?"

We used the full force of our powers to throw Ollie's good vibes at him. But it didn't seem to do anything.

"I'm making a statement," the kid said, shoving Cal aside.

"Whoa whoa whoa, no need for that!" I said. "We're all friends here, right? It's all good."

"It's _not _all good," he sneered. "Fucking baby-killing Johnson and his cronies are making sure the war keeps going forever. People will keep dying for no damn reason. They'll never listen to us. The system's rigged. McCarthy can win all the primaries he wants — he can win _every _primary — the assholes in charge don't care." His face grew redder and redder, and now he was spitting with every hard consonant. "They'll keep killing kids in Vietnam and bring in the fucking National Guard to kill kids here. Fuck the pigs, fuck the DNC, fuck this fucking country!"

About four or five men around us started cheering him on. We looked around, baffled. Cal and Ollie had feel-good pheromones going at full blast, and I was doing my best to amplify them. Other people in the crowd were wandering away, suitably mellowed out. Why were these few apparently immune?

I looked into the boy's mind. And then I saw it.

It wasn't working because he wasn't angry.

He was an undercover cop.

Frantically, I scanned the minds of the crowd, much more deeply this time than I had before. The men cheering were undercover cops. Some people standing by the bandshell were undercover cops. People jeering at the cops along the perimeter were undercover cops. Some came from Chicago's Red Squad, some from the military, some from the FBI. One in six of the protesters whose minds I scanned were undercover operatives of one variety or another.

For a long time I stood frozen, thoughts muddled from Ollie's pheromones and the struggle to wrap my mind around the image of cops screaming at cops so the cops would have an excuse to beat up cops.

While I was too shocked to move, the undercover cop was scrambling up the flagpole, yanking the flag down. Cal was pulling at his shorts, trying fruitlessly to get him back down, while Ollie looked on in benign confusion.

The cops bulldozed through the crowd to arrest the cop. Meanwhile, the other cops tried to replace the flag with a red t-shirt — presumably an improvised communist flag. Ollie was getting increasingly distressed. Cal and I were too high on Ollie and too disoriented by the situation to put up much of a fight.

Some of the protesters started fighting with the police. To their credit (or maybe, in some roundabout way, to ours), some of the Mobe organizers started yelling to stop, that that was exactly what they wanted us to do.

A line of rally marshals in mismatched helmets lined up between the protesters and the encroaching police. But that didn't stop the blue helmets. They went at the crowd with billy clubs and fists, just grabbing whoever was handy and beating them bloody. I watched the scene as on a TV screen, vacantly wondering why we never thought to walk Ollie past the lines of police. Despite a week of police violence, we'd never stopped assuming the anger that boiled over would be the protesters'.

All we'd done was make the protesters too mellow to fight back.

Cal tried to snap me out of it, shaking my shoulders. When I finally met his eyes, he said, "Ollie's freaking out; we've got to get the hell out of here."

He pointed down at the grass where Ollie was curled up, whimpering and sucking on the slobbery string of a candy necklace with no candy left.

I nodded, vaguely ashamed that he had grown so much better at controlling Oliver's powers than I was. He grabbed my arm and we ran from the police. At the border of the park, a line of National Guardsmen were waiting for us, their jeeps affixed with barbed wire. I had only a moment to register the fact that they were wearing gas masks before a cloud of tear gas billowed into us.

Blinded, beaten, and arrested, I lost track of Cal and Ollie in the confusion. The police took me to a women's holding cell and told me nothing. I waited in holding for hours. The women took turns washing the tear gas out of their eyes at the single, filthy sink, wiping their snot away with toilet paper.

Outside, as the sun went down, others who hadn't been arrested flooded into the streets, where more fighting and tear gas awaited them. At some point, the Democratic Party officially named Vice President Hubert Humphrey as their nominee for president.

The first inkling I had of what had happened in men's holding was when someone from the FBI came to bail me out. With her black turtleneck and mod haircut, she would have fit in well with the protesters, but she introduced herself as Charles's friend in the Mutant Division. Without any more explanation than, "I'll take care of it," she shepherded me to a private car. That took me to O'Hare, where a private plane waited. Cal was on the plane, his head in his hands. Ollie wasn't.

That's when Cal told me the whole sorry story. "Ollie said too much. He never stops talking, you know? Always muttering to himself. The guards overhead him mentioning stuff about Mutants, about Charles. And you know this town is fucking crawling with feds right now. They called in the FBI, and those guys took us over to their building, and separated us to ask us all kinds of questions."

He looked up at me, blue eyes bloodshot and watery. "I swear, Tessa, I didn't tell them a thing. Once I was away from Ollie, I could think clearly. I kept my cool, kept my mouth shut. But Ollie, without me… and man oh man, were they interested in him. They kept asking me how his power worked, how effective he'd been against the protesters. They were… excited."

I gritted my teeth and clenched my fists. "Where is he now?"

"I don't know," he said quietly.

* * *

I talked to Cal again later, after we'd gotten back to the school, after I'd ambushed Charles outside of Cerebro and demanded answers. By then, it was so late it was almost morning. I found Cal on the roof, watching the sunrise with a six-pack of beer. He saw me climbing out the window and offered me a bottle. I hesitated for a moment, then took it and sat down next to him.

"Ollie's on a plane to the Mutant Congo," I told him.

"The Mutant Congo? Why the hell's he going _there?" _

I picked at the soggy label of my bottle and sighed. "Charles has a friend in the Mutant Division. A telepath. She wiped all memory of us from the police officers' minds, got them to destroy our arrest record. But the FBI has better defenses against that kind of thing. They wanted to send Ollie to more protests, use him to tamp down dissent. So Charles's friend is smuggling him to the Mutant Congo. They worked it all out over Cerebro: he'll work with ambassadors there. Just sit around in offices with diplomats. No wild protests, no cops, no tear gas. Just men in suits, talking."

Cal scowled. "He doesn't even know anybody over there. He can't even take care of himself."

"The M.C. has facilities for Mutants like him, with cooks and maids and nurses and things. Hopefully they'll let him garden, too. It's not ideal, but it's better than the FBI throwing him into one Chicago after another."

Cal chewed on my words and the inside of his cheek. "So instead of the U.S. government exploiting him to control protesters, the M.C. government will exploit him to get the free world off their back."

I peeled a nice big piece of label off my bottle and lay it on the roof beside me. "I was thinking, in holding — I had a lot of time to think — if we really wanted to stop the violence back there, we should have sent Ollie to the mayor's office. That's where the anger was really coming from." There was a thick stripe of white where I'd failed to peel the entire label off. I picked at its moist edges. "Is it so bad to send Ollie to calm down the people who could blow up the world in a single fit of pique? Maybe they're doing now what we should have done from the beginning: sending him where the anger's really coming from."

"He's an innocent," Cal said. "He doesn't know what's going on. It's not right to exploit him like this."

I took a swig of beer and let its bitterness coat my tongue. "Don't we all get exploited by someone, for some end? That's just the way the world is. Maybe the best we can hope for is to be exploited by someone with our best interests at heart, who exploits us for good ends."

"Do you s'pose Charles has our best interests at heart?" Cal smirked darkly. "Think he exploits us for good ends?"

I didn't smirk back. "I think he thinks he does. I think he tries. He fundamentally believes in the system. After what we saw in Chicago, I'm beginning to think the system might be the problem."

We didn't talk for a bit. Cal gazed up at the fading stars, absently swinging his bottle between his knees. I peeled off more and more of my beer label until all that remained was a few rough strips of adhesive.

Finally, Cal said, "I can't help feeling like we failed him."

"That's because we failed him."

Cal sighed. "You think he'll do any more good in the M.C. than he did in Chicago?"

I took a sip of beer. "I think we overestimated the political utility of good feelings. Maybe that's as true at the top as it is at the bottom. I don't know. My gut tells me that he won't make much of a difference there, either."

"Is your gut often right?"

"I don't know," I said. "I never listen to it."

"Maybe you should start." He grinned. "Just as an experiment. You know, for science."

I laughed. "I'll give it a try. For science."

Cal held his beer bottle aloft. "To Ollie."

I clinked my bottle against his. "To Ollie."

The weary remains of the Hurdy Gurdy Men sat and drank and watched the sun rise, and somewhere in the distance, a radio played, singing songs of love.


End file.
